Chevy Beretta Owners Community

I bought my GTZ in 2002 before I knew anyone on this forum and went to work on it right away. The license plates were in reference to a KMFDM (techno industrial group) album cover which at the time I was considering painting on the hood. That’s when I dubbed it Project Godlike.

Working at a body shop at the time the first thing I did was repaint it jet black. The guy who sold me the car was a friend who sprayed some nice ghost flames on his S10. I told him I was interested in trying something similar and he called me one day out of the blue and said lets draw em out. I had the front end wet sanded when he got there and the next morning I drove it to work covered in masking tape and wrapping paper (that’s all I had to cover it) and misted on 2 coats of harlequin chrome illusion and buried it in 4 coats of clear. This was always the outstanding feature of the car. It seems to turn a lot of heads and gets compliments from people who normally would show no interest in a FWD GM car.

Since it only comes out of hiding a few times per year there have been several rumors floating around my home town. Someone was describing the “Godlike GTZ” to one of my best friends in a bar one night, evidently its a 10 second car with close to 400hp! That’s not what my dyno sheet says… There was also some guy with a turbo Integra GSR who was looking for me wanting to line up for a few years. I still don’t know who he is.

I drove the car to Bfest Milwaukee where I met a lot of you for the first time. It went down the drag strip with a dry 50 shot and got me home but the Original Quad was running on borrowed time. A few months later I drove it to a friends shop with a white jet stream of coolant rolling off the back fin. We pulled the motor and took it to Kelly Moss Motorsports in Madison where they tore it down and found a bad head gasket, cracked head and cracked block. Other than that it was fine. But I was ready for the bad news and had money to burn so we basically started from the ground up. Although I didn’t build it myself it was still a grulling process of sourcing parts and relaying measurements back and forth. Mantapart failed to insure an $1800 prepaid order and the flunkies at UPS lost them. And finally with a week to go till Bfest Columbus I frantically put the car back together hoping to have enough time to break it in and when I fired it up for the first time there was no oil pressure! Missing windage tray bolt. common mistake on these… But I didn’t figure it out in time and gave up and bought my Z26 to take to Bfest. The GTZ was basically down for 3 years.

Since then Ive put about 15k/mi on the built Quad including a bunch of autocross runs and quarter mile passes, 3 trips to Bfest and Nitrofest. Its best 1320′ pass was a 13.3 @ 104 with no tuning whatsoever.
This car is not at the top of my project list right now but future plans are to switch to a higher quality damper system, make some interior changes, setup an engine management system and go faster!